


apartment story (oh we're so disarming, darling)

by akhikosanada



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Begging, Dirty Talk, Domestic Fluff, Explicit Sexual Content, FINALLY I CAN USE THIS TAG, Kinda, M/M, Mutual Pining, SMART SYLVAIN RIGHTS, Semi-Public Sex, Unresolved Sexual Tension, [slaps fic] this baby can hold so much miscommunication into it, background dimiclaude, especially since glenn dies in this fic oops, idiots to lovers, no beta we die like Glenn, the angst is very light i swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:26:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21806602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akhikosanada/pseuds/akhikosanada
Summary: “You didn’t have to come,” Felix tells him, the tiniestthank youhe would be able to manage today.Sylvain only smiles, fingertips light through Felix’s blouse as they rub circles into the flesh. “Race you to the sea?”“You hate water.”“But I don’t hate you,” Sylvain answers, small and warm. “Come on, for old times’ sake.”In the beginning there was heaven and earth,the priest intones, his raspy voice resiling against the bone and nerves inside his skull. Felix disagrees. In the beginning there was sea, and sky, and Sylvain.Five times Felix and Sylvain share a room along the years.Written for Sylvix Secret Santa.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 33
Kudos: 502
Collections: Sylvix Squad Super Stories





	apartment story (oh we're so disarming, darling)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Umbr_el_on](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbr_el_on/gifts).



> elbell: i want domestic modern au fluff, with felix and sylvain having breakfast or doing chores and stuff :) also, i dislike angst!  
> me: awesome!! love that for me!! so, let's start with glenn's funeral,
> 
> So the Sylvix Discord Server did a secret santa, and I was BLESSED with so many good prompts from Elbell!! She wanted, amongst other things, domestic fluff, mutual pining, and fiilthy sauna sex -- so what else could I do but provide...  
> Thank you again so much El, and I'm so so happy you liked it!!
> 
> This fic is built around 6 songs from the album Boxer by The National, being in order: Brainy, Fake Empire, Mistaken for Strangers, Start A War, Apartment Story, and Slow Show. My fav National song is incidentally Apartment Story, and the title was just so perfect that i HAD to pick it!  
> Here's [a companion playlist for the fic](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/16qEkPWcH1sBFaWXxCuZNW?si=RHYEED0nRyy0IxgQLJQKIQ), divided in order of parts by each The National song :)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you like it!!

_everywhere you go is swirling, everything you say has water under it_

“In the beginning there was heaven and earth,” the priest intones, his raspy voice resiling against the stone walls and stained-glass windows, and Felix’s mind fills with felt and froth and fracas.

The church walls are salt-scoured and moss-eaten from centuries of small-town existence, and Felix focuses on the cracks running along the smooth insides, the warmth of May bleeding through in half-suffocation. This, along with the voice, makes his mind fuzzy, his lungs somehow too-full, and when he averts his eyes to the rest of the chapel he realizes, in an instant of distant clarity, that he’s the only one who isn’t crying. His father stands next to him, gaze the stretch and color and consistency of sea, hands brought together in meaningless prayer, in meaningless adjuration; he refuses to look at Dimitri, next to Rodrigue, but he doesn’t have to — he’s pretty clearly the loudest crier in the room, and if he strains an ear Felix can decipher the slight, shy shiver of a thumb running along his knuckles, of Felix’s own father comforting him in ways he never bothered to console Felix himself. Even Miklan is wiping away bitter tears, somehow, on the other side of the alley, the strangest sight he’s ever seen, although he supposes even despicable men can turn human for a moment when losing their best, least-reluctant friend.

Felix is okay. He’s waiting for the moment when the bell tower crumbles on all of them and buries them in along with Glenn, but if there is a God, they aren’t as spiteful as him, and the church holds through another ceremony like he holds through another death in the family.

He does not remember his mother’s funeral. He was too young, had barely learned to walk and call her name before the sound was snuffed out of his mouth like the life out of her, his father reshaping himself into a mere shadow in the candlelights of survival he lit in stand-ins for a dead sun. It was Glenn, who had brought him up, who had taught him about things he did not need to know and lessons he needed to learn, ever gruff and bittersweet-tempered.

But Felix is okay. He’s thirteen, and his mother is dead, and his brother is dead, and his father is nowhere to be felt at all.

So he stares, at everything but the coffin on the altar before them, at the priest’s face contorting into words he refuses to hear and declines to process, at the tears streaming down every face but his although they should, he thinks, be his to weep. It’s a strange thing to experience, that distance from any and all emotion; it’s the first time he’s conscious of not feeling anything at all. Perhaps it’s also something he refuses to process and declines to hear, the slow, pained beating of his heart against his ribcage, as though ignoring it could somehow make him match Glenn a little more, even then, cold and dead and gone. He’s always been good at imitating his brother, after all, though not enough for his father to be satisfied, it seems. Maybe it’d be closer to truth, if he were to get burnt patches of skin underneath pretty clothes and long hair half-charred in places and lungs full of smoke, but he doesn’t think his father would be very happy about Felix tarnishing Rodrigue’s idealized, romanticized picture of Glenn’s death.

People are crossing themselves and murmuring words now, holding tight to each other, and Felix does not move; he does not know what he’s supposed to do, what he’s supposed to say, because Rodrigue never believed in any God or afterlife or redemption; he barely sees, from the corner of his eyes, Sylvain doing his best to mimic the movements and the songs of everyone around him, not quite managing to make the behavior genuine, and he almost laughs until he sees Sylvain crying as well, sublime and silent, and his brain fails to reminisce how to produce the sound.

It’s another strange thing to experience, that the only instant Felix truly wants to sob and wail and scream is when he sees Sylvain blinking away tears.

He wonders what that says about himself; he does not find in himself the strength or the wish to cry for his own brother, but seeing the way his best friend stifles his sorrow makes him want to tear at his own eyes just so he’d be able to provide company, to let themselves fall into each other under the cold covers of misery, to weep a share of Sylvain’s tears if only to take a little bit of the burden off his tired, crimson-rimmed, burnt-out eyes. Felix figures it makes him an awful person, feeling forlorn not from the loss, but because the ones he cares about — the one he cares about most now that Glenn lies in that expensive wooden coffin — are themselves feeling forlorn. The warmth of May fills his chest and chokes him from the inside, invisible nails digging into the flesh of his throat and sawing off his vocal chords, and when Rodrigue moves to make a speech Felix moves, too, quiet as a frozen star, and slips out of the chapel unnoticed.

The low-noon sun hits his face when he opens his eyes again, cruel and unforgiving, barely soothed by the raw sensation of iodine wind, and Felix breathes like he’s surfacing, huge gulps of seaside air anchoring him onto the cobbled courtyard. The Fraldarius summer house is a few minutes’ walk away, uphill from the coast and the ocean waves, Glenn’s favorite place in this world. It used to be Felix’s, too, back when they all lived there every summer for a month and a half, he and Glenn and Ingrid and Dimitri and Sylvain, spent days swimming in the sea and lounging on the sand, spent nights singing and playing video games and telling ghost stories.

Now Glenn is dead, and Sylvain is too old to spend the summer there, and Felix refuses to spend a single minute with Dimitri ever again, so he guesses it’ll just be Ingrid and him for the rest of their miserable teenage years.

“Fe.”

Felix does not need to turn around to know who’s calling him. To Glenn, he’d been _Lixie_ ; Dimitri had tried to call him _Lix_ earlier, only for Felix to turn away lest he punched him right in the jaw; Ingrid has always only referred to him as _Felix_ , or _Felix Hugo Fraldarius_ , when she was particularly mad at him.

But to Sylvain, Felix knows with utmost certainty, he was and is and will always be _Fe_.

“I’m okay,” he says, which truly is the quietest admission that he’s not.

Sylvain does not answer, only pulls him one-armed against his chest; the smooth fabric of his dark sleeve contrasts Felix’s white blouse against the expanse of his collarbones, and he only now realizes he’s forgotten his suit jacket inside the chapel. Sylvain’s taller, now that he’s hit his growth spurt, his chin nesting itself comfortably into the hair at Felix’s crown. Felix wants to fall forward and bury his nose in the crook of his elbow, wants to close his eyes and never open them again; instead, he lets himself look at the sky, and when his head bumps against Sylvain’s shoulder he smells the hint of perfume on the collar of Sylvain’s shirt, vanilla-warm and mint-fresh and lavender-light. There are faint freckles on Sylvain’s fingers where they’re curling lazy into Felix’s arm, telltale of summer’s kiss, the color of his wind-whipped hair; Sylvain is, today as always, the human embodiment of late spring, insouciance-shaped and early June incarnate.

“Let’s go to the ocean,” Felix says, and ignores the way Sylvain tangles their fingers loose as he drags Felix to the exact place they’re both thinking of.

They half-run down the serpentine streets, and it feels like running headfirst into the sound barrier, the pavement under their feet turning into sand alongside the wild bushes and unruly trees growing on the cliffside. He spots it a half-second before Sylvain, that tiny gap between the leaves that leads to a feet-beaten path, barely large enough for children to go through; Sylvain is now close to 175cm and growing, and has to bend almost in half to grab the rope they’d tied onto the heavy roots curling out and away from the rocky bluff. He carefully makes his way down and Felix follows in his footsteps, pushing the tip of his varnished shoes into Sylvain’s prints, sand getting into his socks, the fraying rope burning calluses into his hands where he slides them a little too quickly in his descent. The sting settles Felix in that small piece of universe, spun simply from the song of sea and the scent of salt and the sight of Sylvain. Sylvain turns towards Felix when he reaches the creek, and when he opens his arms Felix does not think twice before jumping. He half-trips when his feet hit the beach, Sylvain keeping him upright as he digs his fingers into the muscle of Felix’s arms, and the swear that slips out of his mouth is enough to make Sylvain exhale a laughing breeze.

The waves break in gentle surf onto the slate that makes the cut of the coast like ghosts of a dozen shipwrecks, ultramarine turning alabaster against the dark of the shore, and it makes him think of Glenn again, of blue eyes and dark hair and porcelain skin, of a roughened voice telling bedtime stories in the verdant glow of stars and planets stuck overhead, of an unrefined laugh over perfectly straight teeth. Sylvain stares at the ocean, too, warily; this used to be their hideaway, the place they’d run to when their parents were too annoying or Glenn swore to kill them for playing with his guitar or they wanted to scare Ingrid half to death, until Sylvain had half-drowned into an icy river on winter vacation with his family and it had only been Felix and Dimitri.

“You didn’t have to come,” Felix tells him, the tiniest _thank you_ he would be able to manage today.

Sylvain only smiles, fingertips light through Felix’s blouse as they rub circles into the flesh. “Race you to the sea?”

“You hate water.”

“But I don’t hate you,” Sylvain answers, small and warm. “Come on, for old times’ sake.”

Felix huffs as he steps away from his best friend and kicks his shoes off.

They undress silently. Felix doesn’t care if sand gets his clothes dirty or damages his shoes, and strips down to his boxers; he tries not to acknowledge Sylvain, yet his eyes still roam his frame as he unbuttons his shirt and lets it drop down. He’s got broader over the year, Felix deciphers; Sylvain’s skin is lightly tanned and taunt across the muscles of his chest and stomach, short red hair falling into his eyes as he unzips his suit pants, and Felix averts his gaze to prevent it from lingering on the jut of his hipbones. He doesn’t know what this is; or he knows, and once again refuses to listen to the pulse of his blood and the pace of his heartbeat, knows only the shame spreading like wildfire over his cheeks and the top of his chest, and he takes a running start towards the cool, open ocean. Sylvain catches up in three long strides, and the small creek resonates with the high-pitched cries and curses they laugh as the waves come crashing down on them.

Felix dives and kicks; his hair tie is probably lost to the currents by now, and he wishes they could wash away everything else, all the heartache and fatigue and feeling. He swims one, two, three long strokes until he surfaces, the sea licking at his shoulders as his long hair falls into his face, and when he turns around Sylvain watches him, a thousand unreadable sentences lost in his gaze and the downturn of his lips as he walks, slowly, towards Felix, mindful of always remaining where his feet reach the ocean floor.

Felix dives again, lets the waves carry him back to Sylvain, lets them roll off him like he wishes Glenn’s death would, rubbing him raw and pulling him down, and he lets himself fall into the gentle ebb and flow. He feels the sand and seaweed brushing against his back as he half-lies there, opens his eyes to replace the burn of tears with the burn of seasalt, the taste heavy on his lips as he holds a last breath of air—

And then a shape comes into view, haloed in red and bathed in light, and a warm hand drags him back up by his wrist.

_In the beginning there was heaven and earth_ , the priest intones, his raspy voice resiling against the bone and nerves inside his skull as he breaks the surface. Felix disagrees. In the beginning there was sea, and sky, and Sylvain.

“Don’t do that. Please.” Sylvain is close, incredibly close; Felix can feel the heat of his skin against the cool water and his own, bare chest, and the hand that’s not curled around his wrist grazes gentle against another pulse point, near his throat, as though looking for confirmation that his heart is still beating. Felix slides a weak arm around Sylvain’s shoulder, gazing up at him through sea-stained lashes and rough-hewn irises, his face an amaranthine light in endless, unclouded blue, and is overcome by the desperate need to kiss him.

He almost does; reaches up, bides his courage and cowardice, until he lets his head fall in the crook of Sylvain’s neck instead, water droplets dripping from his hair down Sylvain’s freckled shoulders and back, and if Sylvain feels him crying, he says nothing.

They remain this way for a while; seconds tick into minutes along the lowering tide before Sylvain carries him to shore, wading in the water while soothing calm in lazy circles across Felix’s shoulderblades, Felix clinging to him all the while until he can find no excuse for Sylvain to carry him any longer and reluctantly steps onto the dry sand. It sticks between his toes as they pick up their clothes, not even bothering getting dressed before climbing back the sinuous path towards the town and harsh reality, and Sylvain’s thumb presses over the vein just below his palm as he pulls them back to the Fraldarius house.

They don’t bother stopping by the church on the way. The pavement digs into Felix’s bare feet like a dozen knives.

The summer house is blessedly silent as they step back in; the curtains are drawn on the first floor, and Sylvain guides them up the stairs and to the third door on the right in the second floor hallway, like it’s his own second home, like Felix wishes it could be. Felix says nothing as Sylvain pulls them down onto the mattress of Felix’s bed, sinking into it like into the cold, cold ocean waves earlier; _don’t leave me_ , Felix asks, demands, implores as Sylvain pulls the covers over them, the way he used to do when they were seven and nine and Felix had had another nightmare, and he barely has time to hear Sylvain brushing empty words against his temple, _I won’t, I promise, I won’t ever leave you_ , before he falls into dreamless sleep.

He wakes up in a tangle of limbs and a flurry of deep, even breaths fanning against his face. The late evening light seeps through the window like blood, dyeing everything it touches a vibrant vermillon; it shines through Sylvain’s messy hair, moving ever-so-slightly with each inspiration, though however bright the setting sun is, it would never quite match Sylvain’s radiance. Sylvain’s arms curl around Felix’s frame, holding him close to his chest, their legs a labyrinth with neither beginning nor end, and Felix’s heart aches when he realizes Glenn is still dead and Dimitri is still gone and he is in love with Sylvain.

Yes, Felix is okay, here and now, in Sylvain's arms; he'll simply wait until the secret breaks out and open like brittle bone and wrecks his friendship with the only person he still cares about.

_let’s not try to figure out everything at once, it’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky_

There are numbers shining neon lagoon along the wall across the room, blurred by distance and the tungsten glow of Felix’s desk lamp.

One of them changes, a digitized line sliding out of place into a new one, and Sylvain does not process what hour it is apart from the fact that it’s past midnight; he’s lying on Felix’s too-firm bed, handwritten papers strewn about his head in an approximation of a pushed-back veil, of a white-and-black crown. He barely registers the words he’s scrawled three classes ago on the loose sheets; he already knows all of them by heart, although he tries his best to pretend otherwise. He’s rather sad his substitute English teacher this year is way more perceptive than she lets on, as though she’d instantly seen through the carefully-crafted mask and costume Sylvain has weaved for himself since the start of high school, these too-bright, too-empty teal eyes piercing holes into the armor until it resembled nothing but the shreds of rags his family’s domestics make out of Miklan’s former riches. _No one would be able to get every answer wrong on a test unless they knew all the right ones_ , Miss Eisner had told him the first time she’d given back a written test, and Sylvain had understood right away that he wouldn’t be able to pretend-fail his finals again this year.

His father had made a fuss when he’d learned Sylvain had been held back for his last year of high school because he had floundered his end-of-the-year exams, but it had given Sylvain an excuse to petition for another specialty, to move him from Economics and Political Science to Literature and Languages, so everything had gone according to plan, truly.

If it allowed him to review his own literature class while he helped Felix with his, well — that was only an added bonus.

“Why are Romeo and Juliet such idiots,” he hears Felix complain, petulant, as he flips another page in his notebook.

“It’s the whole point of the play,” Sylvain says as he restrains himself from launching into the beauty of dramatic irony and tragic, self-fulfilling prophecies. “Plus, they’re thirteen and fifteen. They’re not supposed to be particularly smart.”

“I’m fifteen, and I’m certainly smarter than Romeo.”

_That you are_ , Sylvain wants to answer, but he knows better than to speak. Felix’s grades had taken an abysmal plunge after Glenn’s death; Sylvain still remembered the stars in Felix’s eight-year-old eyes when he’d told Glenn and Sylvain he’d skipped a grade, always vying for his brother’s attention in a way he’d never have to ask anyway, not like Sylvain used to with Miklan, back when he was still naive and a little bolder. Sylvain wonders if it’s why Rodrigue allows him to come more often than a neighbor, than a best friend should, if it’s to make sure Felix properly studies and passes his exams, if it’s to prevent Felix from taking it out of Dimitri now that he’s started living with them; if it’s to allow Sylvain a little respite from his parents’ expectations and constant criticisms now that they’ve kicked Miklan out and made Sylvain the official heir of their company.

He wonders if Rodrigue knows about Sylvain’s feelings for his son, about the way he’s ached for him day and night and day for the past four years, about the thoughts that cross his mind when they’re alone in Felix’s room just like this, Felix’s frame shadowing Sylvain’s bare chest as he’s rising from his desk and dropping at the side of the bed, oversized shirt unfolding over the pale skin of his shoulder.

Sylvain thinks Rodrigue doesn’t; why else would he allow Sylvain in such close proximity? Rodrigue knows the Sylvain who’s asked out by a dozen girls each week, who dates more out of convenience than out of real interest, who loses himself in late night embraces to try and desperately chase the unlived memory of Felix against him, because he cannot forget what is destined to remain inexistant. Rodrigue knows the contempt and disgust Sylvain’s parents hold for people like Sylvain, and frequents them nonetheless, and it’s enough to convince Sylvain that if Rodrigue knew about him, about the true him, Sylvain would end up on a train going nowhere with barely a bag of clothes like Miklan did.

The clock fades in another hour, mint-blurred in the hushed light.

“Not studying _Romeo and Juliet_ anymore?”

“I have a science test tomorrow,” Felix answers, waving a sheet with a drawing of a human body around for Sylvain to spot, and Sylvain’s gaze focuses on the slight, graceful movement of his wrist, on the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathes, on the slight bead of sweat running down his neck in the late May weather.

Perhaps it’s the way Felix’s bun unlaces in long locks lacquered leather, rivulets of shade unashamedly nestling in the cove above his bare clavicle, an eventide oasis Sylvain wishes to lave and lick until it tastes of nothing but the smog of his tongue. Perhaps it’s the fact Sylvain won’t be here next year, not as close, never as close, close enough that Sylvain can just reach out with the tips of his fingers and trace shivering stars and gasping galaxies and undulating universes into his skin, until he can hear Felix ebb into sighs and flow against him.

Perhaps it’s because it’s just ten past two, and Sylvain wants Felix to be his 3am.

Sylvain props himself up on an elbow, reaches past the depths of Felix's collarbones, closes his fingers on the papers in Felix’s hands. “Anatomy is simpler when you've got a subject,” he whispers, and it's loud as a downpour in the hush of nighttime and Felix's bedsheets rustled to thunder underneath him. “Want me to help you study?”

“I am going to batter you to death,” Felix answers without as much as a beat, and Sylvain’s quiet laughter fills the space between them, stuttering like a vinyl record when Felix’s back presses against the edge of the mattress, his head grazing Sylvain’s arm — and it’s so hard, so damn hard, not to be pulled into his ellipse.

Sylvain doesn’t fight it. He hums as he leans forward, just a touch, watching the reverberation against his vocal chords disarray the midnight ink pooling into Felix’s neck. “So what muscles would you need for that?”

“Depends which body parts I use,” Felix says easily as he turns, cool brandy eyes following the path of Sylvain’s veins up his arm. “If I use my legs, probably my adductors and my vastus.”

Sylvain lets go of the sheets of paper, fingernails grazing against Felix’s hand and cutting a gentle road up. “And your arms?”

There’s a tremor that Sylvain feels in goosebumps on Felix’s skin. “Biceps, triceps, deltoids…”

Darkness turns cowards bold, and Sylvain is no exception — he curls his fingers around Felix’s thin wrist, pressing the print of a thumb to the pulse like he’s so used to doing, pulling Felix’s hand to him; and Felix’s fatigue manifests in a surrender, in letting himself be half-dragged up the mattress, his knees digging into the floorboards as he’s bent above Sylvain’s body, Sylvain guiding his hand along the bare skin of his chest.

“What’s this one?” Sylvain asks, voice haze-low and mind honey-high, and the clock shines some minutes past two against Felix’s paper skin as Felix looks down at his own fingers carving signatures along Sylvain’s collarbones.

There’s hesitancy in the way Felix’s tongue smoothes over the bitten asperities that have dug into the pulp of his lips along his teenage years, as he whispers an answer that Sylvain doesn’t care to hear, and Sylvain begrudges the words themselves to be able to touch the very parts of Felix he’s dreamt of for so long against every part of him.

He doesn’t know if he’s the one who pushes Felix’s fingers lower, to his stomach. He doesn’t care. “And these ones?”

Felix inhales sharply, rids them of the air between their bodies, lures it into his lungs and lures Sylvain into him. “ _Sylvain_ —”

“Wrong answer,” Sylvain murmurs, the softness of his voice matching his hand twining into the small hair at the base of Felix’s neck, breaths evaporating into one another—

There’s a knock on the door, and Felix slips down to the ground as he swears.

“Felix,” Dimitri’s voice trickles in from the gap as he opens the door, “do you have any spare pap— oh.”

Sylvain doesn’t know what Dimitri imagines; perhaps he sees Sylvain, half-naked on Felix’s bed, Felix half-fallen on the floor next to the mattress, papers strewn everywhere and hair in disarray. Whatever he pictures, though, makes his face turn ten shades of red at once, and for once Sylvain wishes he would have been found in a more compromising position, if only because the logical cause would be his wildest dreams come true. Felix rises and stomps towards Dimitri, hand curling aggravatingly into spare sheets of paper that he half-throws into Dimitri’s face when he reaches the door.

“There,” he says, acerbic, “here’s paper. Good night.”

The door slams and Sylvain bursts into laughter.

It comes out of him in painful, breathless exhales, loud and unbidden like a cannon shot, and when Sylvain looks back at him Felix’s face is flushed in a simulacrum of a sun. He clicks his tongue as he throws a random pillow lying on the ground to Sylvain’s face, and Sylvain laughs harder, oxygen burning his lungs along all the tension he’s buried inside his chest; when the soft click of the lamp switch kills the light and they’re bathed in the soft moonglow distilled silver through Felix’s curtains, he catches his breath, finally, although it might not be a natural reaction as much as it is the view Felix cuts against the sheen, hair dishevelled and bare collarbones and biting eyes.

“I’m going to sleep. You can take the bed,” Felix adds as he turns to the mattress he’d laid out on the floorboards earlier, the one Sylvain always uses when he sleeps over.

“There’s room enough for two.” It slips out of his mouth barely like a whisper, yet it echoes loud against his palate and the tip of his tongue, and Sylvain finds the strength to hold Felix’s gaze. There’s the ghost of an unreadable emotion obscuring his face, like he’s considering the invitation, like he’s on the verge of concession and confession, but then he’s rolling his eyes and pulling out a blanket from the closet, and when Felix falls into the mattress on the floor Sylvain’s heart falls with him.

“I’m not one of your girls,” Felix whispers in place of a good night. Sylvain barely sleeps.

He wakes up to Felix throwing him a packet of something in his face.

“We’re late for school,” Felix says on the edge of blame, but it’s less scathing, half an apology. Sylvain’s clumsy fingers lift the edge of a paper bag smelling like fresh pastries and chocolate and home. “Get dressed, or I’m leaving without you.”

Felix’s hair is pulled in a long ponytail when Sylvain’s eyes open, looking at him with the softness and sweetness of the croissants inside the bag, and Sylvain muses he has no need for eternity if it does not include the sight of Felix every single morning he’ll wake again. “Lend me a shirt?”

_make up something to believe in your heart of hearts, so you have something to wear on your sleeve of sleeves_

His fingers slide slick and slow across Sylvain’s undressed spine.

The wash of cream hides away the subtle strokes of ink behind a diaphanous veil as Felix gently rubs into the lines etched in a mezzotint; Felix does not know what the most distracting is, between the tattoo curling along his backbone, grey and black and red, and the ridges of solid muscle tensing under his hands. It’s a striking tattoo; Felix does not know when Sylvain has decided to do it, if it has been perfectly planned or an instinctual moment, but the result is beautiful all the same. The black dragon seems to look at him through glinting eyes, the spikes on his back and the sharpness of his scales digging into Sylvain’s flesh, the body and tail curling around stems of stunning spiderlilies, their petals drifting over Sylvain’s shoulderblades in delicate scarlet. Felix traces the edges with his fingers as though learning them by heart, mending the reddened, recalescent skin one healing touch at a time. Sylvain sighs as Felix’s hands drift down the arch of his backbone, spreading the leftover cream over the unmarred spaces, over the smooth, perfect dip of his loins, and if Sylvain feels Felix’s hand linger longer than they have to, he does not say anything.

“Thanks, Fe,” he says instead as Fe rubs the rest of the cream onto his own hands.

“Get a shirt,” Felix answers, and he sees Sylvain’s amused gaze on him as his best friend turns around; they’re in the middle of their shared living room, and there’s no shirt in sight.

“The tattooer told me to leave it as _uncovered_ as possible, though,” and he punctuates the word with an infuriating wink, one that makes heat curl low into Felix’s stomach.

Felix rolls his eyes, practiced in the pretense of annoyance and dismissal. “You’ll have to wear one tonight — or what, you planning on going naked to your own party?”

“Why, are you coming?”

There’s a teasing edge in Sylvain’s stare, lovely and dangerous, that makes him want to lose himself into the void of his dark, dark irises, an edge softened by the curve of a half-smile that Felix never sees him wear for anyone but him, a simple selfishness Felix allows himself to relish. Felix knows Sylvain doesn’t mean it — knows Sylvain likes teasing anyone with a pulse, knows he brings people in his room when Felix is away during classes or the holidays. He wonders if it bothers Sylvain, that Felix had told him he didn’t want him to bring anyone while he was in the flat, back when he moved into Claude’s former room when Sylvain’s former roommate left to spend a year abroad. He wonders what will happen now that Claude has come back, wonders if Sylvain will kick him out and make him go back to living with Dimitri and Rodrigue again. It had been mostly okay during Felix’s first year in college, his year ahead meaning he did not get to see Dimitri enough to be annoyed or angry at him, because Dimitri was cramming his high school exams and Felix had to leave early and come back late anyway; when Dimitri had started studying economics in the same college as them, however, Felix had taken the selfish, selfish opportunity to ask Sylvain for his spare room, and Sylvain, selfless Sylvain, had agreed, and was now certainly regretting it.

“I already see you every day. I don’t need to see you tonight, too,” he says, because he does not want to keep Sylvain from his friends, from his acquaintances, and he knows that seeing anyone flirting with Sylvain or Sylvain flirting with anyone makes it very likely for him to let his anger and pent-up frustration get the best of him. Sylvain’s face falls, though, a crack in the perfect mask he puts up for others and himself and anyone who isn’t Felix, mostly because Felix has known him long enough to decipher truth from lies, to see the real, flawed, wonderful person beneath the fake. “What?”

“Nothing,” Sylvain says, cold and indifferent, his gaze drifting to the side in a dismissal that would work on everyone but Felix.

“It’s not nothing if you’re angry about it,” Felix tries, but there’s irritation staining the words, because he wishes Sylvain could be true with him, could let himself be the actual person Felix has known for years and loved for longer.

“It’s just—” Sylvain stutters, and cards a weary hand into the mess of his red hair, ruffling feathers on a perfect plumage. “Is it so outlandish? To think I’d like for you to be at a party, for once?”

“Your birthday party was last week—”

“Yeah, and this is my farewell party—”

Felix can see the moment Sylvain realizes he’s just fucked up clear as day, in the way his eyes widen and shift and shine brighter than anything in sight, brown turning to smoky quartz in the June afternoon light, in the way his mouth falls open on a cancelled exhale, in the way his fingers stop moving reflexively through his hair.

Felix can see the moment his heart breaks mirrored in the glow of Sylvain’s gaze.

“What?”

“Felix,” Sylvain tries, appeasing like artificial lavender, reaching for him, and Felix steps back and away as his gaze daggers through Sylvain’s whole frame.

“What do you mean, farewell party? Farewell from what?”

“I can explain,” Sylvain says, which probably means he cannot explain at all.

Felix drones out in the middle of Sylvain’s justifications, all soothing baritones like the most loving caress; not because they do not make sense, because if anything, they make a lot of sense — Sylvain having a godsent opportunity to intern in a museum overseas, to do what he truly wants with his life as he studies for his master’s degree in art history, to get away and possibly cut ties from his toxic family. No, what Felix drones out is his own cruelty, his personal greed, the picture he has painted of his own future; of Sylvain by his side, always and forever, more than friends and a little less than lovers; what he drones out is the childish cry inside his mind that screams _you promised, you promised you wouldn’t leave me_.

“So what,” Felix says once he’s sure Sylvain has finished talking, “what was gonna happen? I’d wake up one day, and you wouldn’t be here, and I’d have to realize by myself that my best friend would never come back?”

Sylvain seems taken aback at the flippancy in his tone, because he frowns, and Felix knows that face — that glare he wears when he borders on anger, always directed at anyone but Felix; Felix wishes Sylvain would punch him, just so he’d have an excuse to fight him back, to throw himself against him and slam him against a wall and lay bruising kisses and angry scrapes of teeth all over his body, because perhaps then he’d understand, perhaps then he’d fight back in the exact same way. Felix swallows his hope in bitter saliva when Sylvain answers, distant and combative, in a way he never is but with Felix when no one can see. “What are you saying, Fe? It’s only two years. Of course I’ll come back.”

It’s only two years, Felix thinks. It’s already too many.

“Go then,” Felix says as he turns around to escape to his bedroom, where it’s lonely, where it’s safe from choice and heartbreak and the sting of truth. “I don’t give a fuck. Just leave, see if I care.” He slams the door behind him.

He goes to the party, still, mostly because Ashe coaxes him with sweet text messages and steely voicemails, tells him how miserable Sylvain looks when Felix isn’t here. He barely dresses up; he still puts on the floral button-up shirt that Sylvain had told him suited him well, once, in what now seems like a lifetime ago. He calls a taxi too, for good measure, because he cannot waste an entire hour in the train between their flat and his father’s house. It was Dimitri, that had been the one to allow Sylvain to get their house for his farewell party, and the mere fact that Dimitri knew, and allowed it, and did not even bother telling him makes him angrier at him than he’s been in months; he wonders if he can blame Sylvain for that, for his relationship with his reluctant, adoptive brother he had worked so hard in reconstructing brick by brick going down the drain again.

“You knew,” Felix tells Dimitri as he opens the door when Felix rings, and he has at least the decency to look apologetic, blue eyes looking down at him in compassion frosted over. He’s even taller than him, now, almost taller than Sylvain if he’d remember not to draw his shoulders in, and that alone makes annoyance flare through his lungs again.

“I didn’t think it was my place to tell.”

_I trusted you_ , Felix wants to say as he pushes inside. Music is blasting through the first floor, the chatter of people laughing and gossiping filling up the space like smoke in a speakeasy. “So you didn’t tell me, but you still gave him the house. Great sense of priorities here, boar.”

He knows it’s unfair of him; he hasn’t called Dimitri that in years, and he does not even find remotely enough catharsis in the way Dimitri winces as he softly closes the door. Dimitri is too honest to pretend he didn’t know either, or to pretend he thought Felix knew; he only looks down as he takes Felix’s coat and hangs it in the dresser built into the side of the stairs. Felix is about to say something again, he doesn’t know what, but he’s stopped by the foreign weight of an arm on his shoulder, of an elbow digging into the crook of his neck.

“If it isn’t loverboy, here,” a soft, contralto voice croons into his ear, and Felix knows who it is if only by the way Dimitri turns five shades of red above his complexion.

“What do you want, Claude?”

“I was wondering if you’d show up, you know,” Claude says as he looks at him, knowing eyes glinting emerald into the low light of the entryway, and there’s liquid swirling in a cup that threatens to spill over as he dances around Felix. “I just can’t stand seeing my boy Sylvain all sad and moody. Dimitri, hi, fancy seeing you here.”

“T-this is my house, though?”

Felix slips away from the conversation before he dies of secondhand embarrassment, and finds Sylvain outside in the garden talking to Ashe; he’s wearing the tight, white shirt Felix loves on him, the one that he wishes he could tear out of the way, and his bangs are half-brushed to the side, and when Sylvain turns and spots him through the big French window Felix’s breath catches on fire inside his lungs as an unknown, magnetic force compels him outside.

Ashe barely has the time to say hello and get pointedly ignored when Felix crashes into Sylvain’s arms.

Sylvain is warm and waiting and wonderful as they hug, patient and kind when he wraps his own arms around Felix’s shoulders and pulls him against his chest; Felix breathes in the perfume in the crook of his neck like it’s his last breath, feels vanilla and lavender and mint filling his chest in the most pleasant burn, notices his eyelashes brush against Sylvain’s pulse point as he closes his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers where no one else can hear. “It… wasn’t fair of me.”

“No,” Sylvain concedes, “it wasn’t.”

“Are we good?”

Sylvain chuckles against his ear, the puff of air he exhales brushing shivers along every part of him. “Yeah, we’re good.”

The rest of the night is a blur of crimson, Sylvain’s entire being bright and blinding amongst his guests, Felix’s gaze drawn to him like a sailor to shore; Claude keeps finding him now that he’s learnt he’s going to take Sylvain’s room in the flat for the next two years at least, looks at him with curiosity and awareness and a hint of pity he has trouble hiding away, not in the rehearsed way Sylvain hides his emotions, a rough diamond of manipulation. Guests set up tents outside, in his house’s huge garden, and he picks one to sleep in, with a see-through roof that lets him contemplate the night sky — Sylvain joins him, when the night dies down to hushed whispers and wicked eyes and burning touches, only looks at him through dark eyes as he lies beside him and traces the edge of constellations with the ghost of his fingers.

_We’ll be looking at the same stars, you know_ , Sylvain tells him as he drifts asleep, _think about it, and think about me_ , and Felix whispers an empty promise as he falls into oblivion to the sweet music of Sylvain’s voice.

He wakes up, one sunny, sultry summer day, to the irritating vibrations of his phone against his bedside table.

Sylvain’s name and picture light up his phone, illuminating the bedroom in an artificial glow, and for a single moment Felix contemplates answering, contemplates begging Sylvain not to leave, contemplates letting all that ugly selfishness out and loose and ask him to stay, to give up the only thing Sylvain’s ever truly wanted, to abandon his dream career for the absolute nightmare that is Felix’s whole person, to trade a limitless future for an exhausted past.

It’s enough, Felix decides, it _must_ be enough, that he’s the last person Sylvain thinks of before boarding, that he’s the one Sylvain calls while he’s waiting in the departure lounge; and little childish promises should not mean this much, Felix determines, not when there are memories to be built and paths to be carved and lives to be consumed.

He buries it into his heart, that insignificant indulgence. He does not answer.

_walk away now and you’re gonna start a war, whatever went away, i’ll get it over now_

He wakes up at 10:30, and the noise of chatter and the coffee machine resonates like an aria through the amphitheater of his high-strung mind.

The winter sun parts his eyelashes and forces its way into his vision, fulgent and unforgiving, and Sylvain realizes Ashe has probably drawn the curtains to their shared bedroom when he got up two hours before the rest of them all. The groan he lets slip out as he stretches adds a subtle bass line to the soprano of Ingrid’s laughter through the half-opened door, and his feet beat along the whirr of percolating espresso as he steps out into the tiny world of the big mountainside apartment.

“Hey man,” he says to Dimitri between two yawns and the careless drop of oversized sweatpants over his hipbones, “happy birthday.”

Dimitri beams at him like a tiny moon, probably because Sylvain has learnt to drop the teasing “your Highness” he used to speak in place of his name, in the two years he’s been away, in the lifetime he’s been far from home. He ignores Dimitri’s yelp as he ruffles his hair and high-fives Claude, who’s sleepily curled in his boyfriend’s lap; Ingrid and Felix had spent the entirety of the night before relating the tale of Dimitri and Claude’s Disney-worthy love story, from their first meeting when Claude took Sylvain’s second room in the shared flat to their awkward non-dates and their messy first kiss under Felix’s disgusted, daggery stare.

Sylvain had wished Felix had answered, at that time - wished Felix had picked up his phone instead of sleeping in, two and a half years before, wished he could have had the occasion more than the guts to ask him if he wanted Sylvain to stay; he’d rehearsed the words by heart like a nursery rhyme, like a concert finale, _say you want me to stay and I will_ , and he’d had neither the guts nor the occasion to say them at all, except alone, in the dead of night, whispered to the beat of his heart on one too many evenings alone and lonely, spent along ghosts of future past with hair a shade away from midnight and eyes like fake topaz.

Perhaps it had been for the best, for Sylvain to try and move on, to try and run away — he does not know the difference — because as he’s about to ask Ingrid about Felix’s whereabouts, the front door opens, and the delight and despair that twine into his ribs when he sees Felix reminds him he’s still alive, reminds him he’s finally home.

Sylvain can see in Felix’s eyes that he’s trying his best not to slam-dunk the bag of pastries in Dimitri’s face as he walks to the open kitchen, and laughs, laughs, laughs.

Felix has not even bothered removing his coat before fixing the pastries on a plate, and the remnants of snow tessellating the dark fabric prevent Sylvain from pulling him against his chest, like he used to do so easily when they were kids, like he had done one last time on a warm May morning in the wake of silence and sorrow.

He props his bare back against the cold edge of the counter instead, polished wood digging into the muscle and the inked-red petals. “I see you still haven’t learnt to say good morning.”

“I see you still haven’t learnt to wear shirts.” The reply is immediate and biting and absolutely exhilarating as Felix’s eyes sweep unreadable over Sylvain’s chest until they reach his face; Felix has not grown taller, but he’s grown broader and bolder, just a little, in the way he holds his shoulders higher and maintains his stare burning cold, in the defined, defiant cut of his chin and the careless swipe of ebony that covers his forehead, beauty like a rough-cut diamond untarnished by the years and the oceans that have kept them apart — except in the darker lines that shade and sharpen his irises like prongs around a gem.

“You cut your hair,” Sylvain says as he examines the short ponytail at the top of Felix’s head and curls his fingers into his palms instead.

Felix gets two cups out of a cupboard above the stove, the tips of his toes propping him up as he reaches up with deft fingers. “So I did.”

“This should register as a hate crime.”

“Didn’t you know? I’m Sylvain-phobic.” The sting of Sylvain’s name against Felix’s tongue is soothed by the way Felix’s eyes soften when he rolls them, by the slight curve of a smile threatening to break across his face. “How many sugars?”

“One,” Sylvain asks over the lap of liquid against porcelain as Felix pours him a cup of coffee.

Felix drops two sugarcubes, and Sylvain smiles.

God, has he missed him so.

It only hits him now, with the strength of a fluttering feather, slow and devastating; Sylvain has missed Felix’s everything, has missed all the parts others do not care enough to see, has missed the way he hides his laughter behind his long, elegant fingers when he does not want people to know they’re being funny, has missed how his irises melt down from copper to salted caramel when they land on a view that makes him thaw soft as snow, has missed the sound of his voice, low and rough, as he chides Sylvain for putting too much sugar in his coffee, has missed the fact that Felix knows exactly how many sugars Sylvain puts in his coffee — which is always the amount he asks for, plus one he leaves unsaid —, has missed the very way he’s missed him in these sacrosanct years they used to spend side by side, that kind of yearning akin to simmering water a little too hot to brew tea, contrast to the way his own longing now threatens to boil and overspill into words he would not be able to take back.

“Felix,” Sylvain murmurs like a memory when Felix hands him his cup and their fingers brush, and he relishes the shiver of breath that tenses into Felix’s throat as gold, gold eyes snap up to meet his — and Sylvain almost tells him, almost lets the three simple syllables swirl off into the cold air between them, but the front door opens again on Ashe’s whirlwind of words and Dedue’s quiet laughter and the crinkle of plastic grocery bags, and the world starts into motion again.

He wonders if he should tell him, if he should break the fragile, friendly equilibrium they’ve found again after so much time apart, in this still, snowy microcosm — he wonders if he should tell him, when they help Ashe and Dedue make a meal for everyone in the flat and Felix sneaks a little too much spice into the sauce, when they’re stuck in mid-air on the ski lifts and Felix follows along as Sylvain makes it swing to scare Ingrid, when Claude steals Felix away with a _let’s race, Fraldarius_ and they speed down the piste on their snowboards only to intentionally send fresh powder snow into Dimitri’s and Sylvain’s faces as they pass them by.

He wonders if he should tell him, that the sound of his laughter thunders down and strikes up a snowslide in Sylvain’s heart, buries him in feelings he’d thought forgotten and forbidden, frosts his lungs and freezes his blood, and it feels like he’s drowning in that ice-cold lake Miklan had dropped him in when he was ten all over again, except infinitely more delicate and desired.

“You should tell him,” Dimitri says, beautiful and golden in the wintry light, snow-speckled to his eyelashes, all the brands of happy he deserves and Sylvain never was and probably never will be.

Sylvain smiles in reflex as he fluffs out flakes from Dimitri’s half-ponytail with a heavy gloved hand. The ski mask hides his gaze decently enough. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Your Highness.”

Sylvain thinks he’s going to sigh and let it go, that he’s going to let that edge of competitiveness he keeps wrapped under layers of propriety and grace win over, that he’s going to chase after Claude and Felix and teach them who’s truly first, who’s truly best — but he stays, and he frowns, and his eyes are ice and steel and sky as they pierce into Sylvain’s.

“You’ve been gone for two and a half years, Sylvain,” Dimitri speaks as though it’s an accusation rather than a mere fact, and Sylvain thinks a lot has changed in that short eternity. “If you think Felix hasn’t missed you dearly, you haven’t been paying attention.”

Sylvain has no time to reply before Dimitri leaves him in the snowdust and slides down the rest of the way.

Sylvain knows — knows Felix, too, has probably missed him, though certainly not with the same intensity; Sylvain knows Felix hasn’t spent entire nights healing his heart through dreams as it tore itself apart during the waking day, hasn’t felt the same ache of distance in his very nerves during each of their few Skype calls, hasn’t thought about him in each of the faces canvassed over the love scenes he had to study and look over on a day-to-day basis. He knows there’s _something_ there, something too subtle to weave it into words, that magnetic pull to one another like revolving twin stars, but he also knows Felix probably isn’t aware of it, isn’t aware of the way Sylvain is tossed into motion around Felix’s mere presence, isn’t aware of the gazes Sylvain can feel lingering on his skin for hours on end each time Felix looks his way, isn’t aware of the way Felix’s hands accidentally reach for any part of Sylvain when they’re in close proximity.

Sylvain knows Felix doesn’t need _him_ but only needs the intimacy nearness provides. Sylvain wishes he could be fine with that.

He’s down the piste before he even realizes it; skiing has always come like second nature to Sylvain, what with the numerous trips to the family ski lodge his parents made him attend every winter. He remembers bringing Felix along, once, teaching him how to stand on his feet and slide down the fresh-fallen snow when Glenn was too busy exploring the station with Miklan. He’s almost surprised to see Felix waiting for him at the bottom of the piste, a foot still on his snowboard and another in the snow, ski mask drawn over his forehead as loose strands of coffee-colored hair fall frizzy from the beanie he wears over that short ponytail. His eyes blaze hot as Sylvain slides next to him, and Sylvain forgets the temperature has hit the negatives.

“I wanna go off-trail,” is what vapors out of his lips.

“Sure,” Sylvain says, because he couldn’t ever say no to any of Felix’s requests if he wanted to. “Lead the way.”

The snow is thicker, off-piste, powdery and blinding and immaculate; Felix jumps off the lumps of frozen snow and does little tricks with his board, which is as beautiful as it is endearing, in Sylvain’s eyes. Sylvain must be one of the only people who knows about this side of Felix, this proud, bragger personality of his, born from years and years of pressured perfection and unhealthy hard work that all but collapsed with Glenn gone, for there had never been someone Felix was so pressed to please than his older brother. Everyone had liked Glenn — hell, Ingrid had a stupid crush on him before she’d had her college realization that girls were infinitely better than men in every which way — but to Sylvain, he’d always been Miklan’s friend before he’d been Felix’s brother, and that definition in itself had prevented him from ever admiring Glenn’s finer qualities. Still, Felix had died with Glenn, that day, and as such a piece of Sylvain, too, had died alongside him.

Sylvain had wished he could replace Glenn, then, had wished he could become what Felix needed, because Sylvain had always been best at becoming the things other people needed him to be, until he’d understood he wished he could become what Felix wanted — that he wished he could become himself, in his entire, ever-unwantedness, and not a mere shadow of what Glenn could have been.

“Fuck,” he hears Felix mutter beside him, and he barely has the time to turn around before he sees Felix’s snowboard go flying and Felix tumble away in a heap of flailing limbs.

Sylvain drifts hard enough to dust a wave of powder flakes on the nearest pine tree, before skating up-trail to where Felix has landed face-first and half-buried in the thick blanket of snow. His beanie lies a few feet away, and he’s lost his mask, too; his hair pools in disarray from the bun he’d tied it into before they all left the flat.

“Are you okay?! Are you hurt?”

If Felix notices the edge of panic in Sylvain’s voice, he doesn’t quip about it, and props himself up on his arms before rolling onto his back with a grunt. “Nothing’s broken. Probably.”

“Probably.”

“Oh, shut it, Gautier,” Felix says, but there’s no bite to it. He looks at Sylvain, and Sylvain can almost see the glint of thought travelling through his pupils, though he cannot quite read what it says. “Help me up.”

Sylvain lets his ski poles fall onto the snow as he reaches for Felix’s hand, before Felix grabs it and pulls Sylvain down with him before throwing a handful of snow in his face, and he’s tasting icewater on his lips. One of his skis has dislodged from his boots, and Sylvain carelessly unlocks the second one when he hovers over Felix like a beast over his prey.

“Oh, fuck you,” Sylvain says as he pulls onto Felix’s winter coat to shove some snow down the collar against his neck. There’s a yelp in Felix’s throat, high-pitched and half-laughed, and it rolls over Sylvain’s features in the most graceless of caresses and the world’s most-wonderful sound, his eyes slits of amber as they crinkle at the edges, his back arching in tension until his chest almost touches Sylvain’s, and Sylvain lets himself fall beside him before he surrenders to the urge of tracing the cold expanse of Felix’s throat with his fingers, with his lips.

Felix groans as he falls back down, half into the Felix-shaped hole the snow has dug for him, half into the untouched snow closer to Sylvain. “I knew I should have followed Claude and Dimitri.”

“Did you forget I was trouble?”

Felix stares up at him now that Sylvain’s half-propped on an elbow on his side, and his mouth twists in the ghost of a pout. “I should have left you alone up there.”

“Aww, Fe, were you waiting for me?”

“Of course I was.”

The admission steals Sylvain’s breath away, but not more than the way Felix’s eyes widen in realization, gold frosted over with surprise and awareness and desperation, not more than the fearsome blush spreading over Felix’s cold-reddened cheeks as he evades Sylvain’s gaze, and Sylvain inches closer, lays a gentle hand next to Felix’s face, the glove fabric carving prints in the snow.

“It’s your fault I fell, anyway.”

Sylvain traces the edge of Felix’s jaw with his eyes instead of his fingers, and his tongue and breath are hot against the ice of his own lips. “Maybe you should stop looking at me, then.”

“No,” Felix says as he looks right into Sylvain’s eyes again, and it sounds like a cannon in the still winter air. “Never again.”

It distinctly feels like a freefall, kissing Felix.

He can probably attribute it to the way Felix pulls him in like he’s always expected it, as though they were fated to, one day, fall into each other in this exact same way, bodies drawn against one another and enveloped in frozen seas — Sylvain ghosts the breath of a kiss onto Felix’s mouth, and Felix rises as he winds his hands around his neck and presses full against him, ice-cold lips snow-stung and hail-tasting, and Sylvain lets himself chase the only thing he’s ever truly wanted as he closes his eyes. The underside of his glove is rough, but he still lets his hand graze against Felix’s jaw, drinking the sough that falls from Felix’s throat in shivery sips, and he welcomes the burn of Felix’s tongue against his before he pulls back, just a touch, just to angle the cold tip of his nose alongside Felix’s and exhale a searing breath against the chill of his teeth, only to kiss him deep again when Felix’s hand buries into his hair and pushes him back into him.

“Felix,” Sylvain whispers as they break apart, and he almost tells him.

When Ingrid’s voice calls their name in the faraway, sounding equal parts scared and angry, they fly apart instead.

Sylvain expects it all to be just that — a momentary instinct, a touch-starved lapse in friendship, does not seek anything more the rest of the afternoon out. If anything, he keeps Felix at a distance, leaves him time to think about this almost-declaration, about this step away from the unknown; Sylvain has had relationships, callous and careless, compensations for Felix’s absence, removed in emotions as he was in clothing. So Sylvain tells himself that it’s already enough, to have kissed Felix like this, to have allowed himself this timeless, frost-bitten leniency, the skeleton of his feelings in icebound amber to be exposed to none in the museum of his mind.

If anything, Sylvain does not expect, when he declares that he’d rather take a look at the spa instead of going to have a drink with his friends, Felix almost immediately answering he’d like to go as well. Sylvain knows they should probably talk, because the little tongue-to-tongue they shared does not replace the heart-to-heart he needs to have with him; still, Sylvain has trouble picturing giving angsty love confessions and ruining his closest friendship in a place meant for relaxation. Felix seems to be immovable, though, just as Ingrid tries to tease him into a drinking match, and better this than never, Sylvain decides, because his heart surely cannot take much more of this, of watching Dimitri and Claude together and happy while he’s still tearing into the open wound of the aches he’s nursed for Felix for a decade.

So when the rest of their friends leave in heavy clothes and scarves and shoes, Sylvain grabs a bag with a towel and his bathing suit, and follows them out the door. Felix, too, follows once he’s traded his heavy snowboard shoes for thigh-high boots — Sylvain’s brain had been close to short-circuiting when he’d seen Felix get out of the train in these, the day before — and their friends leave them at the spa entrance with waves and cheek kisses and Claude’s knowing gaze on Sylvain.

Sylvain elects to ignore him, just like he elects to ignore a lot of things pertaining to his love for Felix, and contemplates the options available to him until Felix slaps a bill on the counter under the seasonal cashier’s shocked, exhausted gaze. “Two entrances. Please,” he adds when Sylvain frowns in his overall direction, and he cannot stay mad at him for very long when Felix grabs him by the wrist and drags him to the changing rooms. Sylvain has seen Felix change, over the years, has seen Felix clothed and half-naked and down to his underwear, though never in the kind of situations he’s often fantasized; today, it seems, is not one of these times either, because Felix flees to the other side of the room as soon as the door closes and turns his back to him. Sylvain watches him, for a minute, watches how his hair unties into long locks licking his shoulders and the edge of his spine, looks at Felix’s hands undoing his coat and slipping under the tight fabric of his sweater where it falls across his hips, relishes the way the cotton slides up alongside pale ribs and the curve of his back as Felix pulls it over his head—

Felix cards fingers into his hair to put them back into place, and Sylvain turns around and does not turn back until he’s in his bathing suit, Felix looking everywhere but at him when he grabs their clothes and folds them into a locker on the side.

It occurs to him, as Felix opens his mouth again, that they have not spoken a word to each other since they entered the building, and barely enough to be labelled a conversation since they lied in the snow. “What do you wanna do?”

He sounds almost bored in his dismissal, and it hurts like a papercut, like pricking a finger on a needle, ever-so-tiny and unforgettable and asking to be rubbed in. “Hammam sounded good.” Felix raises an eyebrow. “It’s like a sauna, just… wet.”

“Wet.”

“It’s very steamy.”

“Fine by me,” Felix says as he leads them out of the room and into the wooden-and-tile hallways, fists clenched loose at his sides. They pass a few rooms in complete silence and merely stop to grab ice-cold water bottles from a fridge outside a wooden door, relaxing music echoing through the doors to the massage rooms, laughter and discussions lost in the sauna heat, water streaming in sleepy cascades from the open, cold-shower room. The hammam door is glass, and coated in steam, shutting anything out from view, and the vapor is blessedly hot against Sylvain’s cold skin when they enter the place.

Somehow, Sylvain thought they’d be alone, thought people would be busy drinking overpriced mulled wine and eating cold cheese off wooden cutting boards at this time of day; he clearly was not the only one dreaming of a hot bath after his tumble in the snow, because two girls raise their gaze towards them as they step in, polite hellos bouncing against the tiled walls of the room. One of them grows redder as she looks at Felix, green eyes widening in interest as she smiles at him more than at Sylvain; the edge of a dangerous thought surfaces in Sylvain’s mind like the tip of an iceberg, and he tries his best to shove it down to the depths where it came from. Even the benches are entirely made of ornamental tiling, he notices, white and teal and gold, and Felix takes a seat on one of them as Sylvain goes to the other side of the room and puts a few drops of essential oil into a bowl below the steamer, pouring a stream of water over the sensitive thermometer. “It creates more vapor,” Sylvain says with a wink to Felix’s nonplussed stare, and is rewarded with a hiss of searing steam from the machine. He almost cannot see Felix from across the room, now, can just discern a shadow in the shape of his best friend; he imagines it’s even harder for the other girl to watch, now, and he walks back to Felix’s side with a satisfied smile.

The girls resume a discussion Sylvain does not care about, white noise to the beating of his own heart into his chest as he feels Felix’s warmth so close to him, their arms just a touch away. Sylvain has always disliked the heat, which is why he likes these kinds of rooms more than saunas — it’s less suffocating, somehow, inspiring all the steam scented summer savory, and he lets his head fall against the wall behind him as he closes his eyes, opening them only when he hears the sound of feet against the floor and the whisper of goodbyes and the rustle of Felix’s body rising beside him. Sylvain almost thinks Felix is chasing after the girl, almost thinks he’s seen the way she looked at him and craves to find out more, almost lets his heart sink in his chest — but Felix only closes the door behind them and slides the locking latch in.

“What are you—” _doing_ , Sylvain wants to ask, but Felix has already stepped back to him, swift and urgent, and crashes their lips in a bruising kiss.

Felix kisses him like he’s desperate for everything breath of air Sylvain has to give, like he’s trying to reassure himself of Sylvain’s presence and reality, like he’s making up for lost time; Sylvain gladly lets him, his mind overtaken by heat of a different kind than the one they’re in, dances his fingers alongside Felix’s side as Felix falls into his lap, sings slow sighs into Felix’s mouth as his lips open for him. Felix’s arms come around Sylvain’s shoulders as though he’s the only thing anchoring him here, as though he’s about to fall off into nothingness if he ever lets go — as if Sylvain would ever let him go, now, he thinks when Felix’s nails scrape against his nape and his skull when he digs his fingers into Sylvain’s hair, and he raises a thumb to soothe circles into the side of Felix’s face as he coaxes Felix into him, tongue to tongue and chest to chest. Sylvain presses fingerprints he hopes won’t bruise into the small of Felix’s back, and when Felix shifts above him and grinds against him he forces them apart with the most heart-wrenching groan.

“Fe,” Sylvain says, and Felix moans around the bites he nips into his neck, hard enough to mark, before he smoothes the pain flaring red with the soft plush of his tongue, “ _fuck_ , Felix, wait, we shouldn’t do that, we shouldn’t—”

Felix tears himself away from Sylvain, and Sylvain shivers from the cold left in place of Felix’s chest against his, from the quiet dark in Felix’s eyes as he watches Felix’s expression twist from surprise to sorrow. “What?”

Sylvain reaches for his face on instinct, cups his jaw with both hands, rests his forehead against Felix’s before leaving a soft kiss on his lips, and Felix instantly relaxes back into him. “I meant we shouldn’t do that _here_ , idiot, people could see—”

“Sylvain,” Felix says, requests, demands, and the sound of his name into Felix’s voice, now as always, boils the blood in his veins and goes straight to his cock. “I’ve waited for you for _years_. Don’t you dare deny me this.”

Sylvain has never been good at denying Felix Hugo Fraldarius anything, and so he kisses him.

_Yes, yes_ , Felix says against his tongue as Sylvain pries his mouth open, winds his fist into Felix’s hair and pulls, feels the way Felix’s voice scratches like a broken cassette tape and the way Felix’s cock hardens against his thigh.

“Fe,” Sylvain exhales as they grind together, slowing down Felix’s desperate pace with a lazy roll of hips, the tiled bench digging into the muscle of his thighs, “what do you want?”

“Don’t tease,” Felix chides when Sylvain slides the tip of a finger underneath the waistband of his bathing suit, grazing the soft skin there in the barest of scrapes, and Sylvain thrusts at a different angle, makes their erections catch against each other, both of them gasping at the feeling in perfect synchronicity.

“Say it,” he demands against the side of Felix’s throat, sears the words into the flesh with his teeth, and Felix finally answers.

“You.” It leaves him in a shameless breath, rough-pitched and tender, and Sylvain’s heart soars. Felix repeats it between kisses, between each grind Sylvain pushes against him, _you, I want you, always, it’s always been you, I want you, I love y_ — and Felix’s words stutter in his throat when Sylvain finally pulls his swimsuit down and takes him in hand, fingers draping around his cock and pushing down leisurely before reaching up again, the nail of his thumb gently digging into the slit of the tip and catching the precum there.

“I missed you,” Sylvain finally, finally tells him when Felix releases the grip he had on Sylvain’s hair and shoulders to slide an exigeant hand down and pull Sylvain’s dick out of his own swimsuit, doing his best to mimic the exact things Sylvain is doing to him through open-mouthed kisses and moans. “I missed you every single day. I thought I was going to die.”

“Don’t you dare,” Felix commands, and he bats Sylvain’s hand off to fully press against him and close his fingers around both their cocks, “don’t you dare leave, don’t you dare leave me ever again—”

“I promise,” Sylvain swears against Felix’s lips, and the rest of the sentence fails to leave his mind as Felix’s hand slicks their leaking erections and he loses himself in the up and down and up; Sylvain trails his tongue from Felix’s lips to his shoulder when he reaches for Felix’s ass and carves waning stars into the flesh. “I missed you,” he repeats again, urging Felix on as they move against each other like tides in moonglow, “ _all_ of you,” his fingers find their way down the cleft, tease gentle brushes against the rim of his hole, a little loose from heat and steam, and there’s laughter and bliss in his voice when Felix shivers and moans in time with his next words, “even the parts I hadn’t known until now.”

“Lube,” Felix says as he releases their cocks, “brought some, water bottle,” and Sylvain finds heaven in the way Felix sounds so well-fucked after just a little teasing, in the implication that Felix has planned this, wanted him enough to shamelessly bring along lube in a fucking public space, didn’t want to wait any longer. He watches Felix bend out and away to reach for a small vial, pocket-sized, barely enough for a round, and when Felix gives it to him and settles down again Sylvain looks at the way the edge of the bench has dug into his shins in peach turned coral. Sylvain presses smooth, healing kisses at the corner of Felix’s lips, feathering all the love he feels for him across his face as he uncorks the bottle one-handed and pours some onto his fingers.

“Look who’s insatiable now,” he teases, remembering the way Felix had once said these exact words to him, the way it had made heat pool low in his gut along the simmering _s_ , “begging to get fucked where anyone could see.”

“Shut up,” Felix bites into Sylvain’s throat, but the ache is not quite the same when he’s trying to push himself onto Sylvain’s fingers rubbing circles where he wants them most.

“Tell me what you want,” Sylvain asks again, dizzy from the heat and the very fact that Felix _wants him_ , that Felix has admitted he’s wanted him, probably not for such a long time as Sylvain has, but pretty damn close.

“Fuck me.”

Sylvain’s smile borders on a grin, feral as his teeth dig into his lower lip. “Ask nicely.”

“Fuck me,” Felix orders as Sylvain presses a fingertip against him, and Felix wraps his hand around the two of them again, pumps slow and soft, and repeats it at each of Sylvain’s teasing caresses, growing more desperate at each iteration, _Sylvain, fuck the sense out of me, right here, right now_ , and Sylvain struggles to think, Felix’s hole is so, so loose under his fingertips, slick with lube and steam, _Sylvain, Sylvain, Sylvain,_ _please_.

Sylvain sinks a full finger into him, and Felix’s back arches on a moan.

“God, you’re so good,” Sylvain tells him as he pulls out and back in, curls his finger just so that it drags across the ring of muscle, and Felix keens at the praise, fists their cocks harder. Sylvain fucks a second finger into him when he catches some lube dripping down, slides gentle thrusts along the pace of Felix’s hand around them, each ebb and flow sending metronome sighs drifting into the steam, whispers of _yes_ and _fuck_ and _yes_ , and when Sylvain’s fingers curl inside Felix to the last knuckle the sound that leaves Felix is almost a shout — he almost thinks Felix has come, because there’s a particularly heavy trail of precum coating their cocks and Felix’s fingers as he looks down, but Felix keeps moving his hand harder and faster—

“Fe, close,” Sylvain warns when he pulls his fingers out, and Felix’s hand leaves them so suddenly he almost has whiplash, but Felix’s hands come to Sylvain’s jaw and pull him into another kiss, into what he cannot describe as anything less than utmost adoration.

“I want you,” Felix confesses again, echoing quiet against the tiled walls and over their overheated skin, “inside me,” and Felix reaches for the bottle on the bench and pours the rest of the lube onto Sylvain’s dick as he slicks it with deft fingers.

“Felix,” Sylvain answers as his length slides delightfully along Felix’s ass in the barest of friction, swallows Felix’s sigh at the call of his name, lines up so the head rests flush against Felix’s hole as it tenses and relaxes in an effort to pull him in.

“Sylvain, inside, please, I’m begging y—”

The last syllable effervesces light and high-pitch into the steam as Sylvain sinks into Felix, just the tip at first, before he almost pulls out and Felix slams back onto his cock until it’s fully sheathed inside of him.

“Fuck,” Sylvain swears as Felix fucks himself onto him, his nails digging into Sylvain’s shoulders as he leans in to kiss him again, all tongue and teeth, “Fe, love, you’re so beautiful—”

“God,” Felix laughs as Sylvain thrusts inside him, and when Sylvain opens his eyes Felix’s gaze is blazing tourmaline, half-lidded and lustful, each of Sylvain’s movements making sweat fall across his brow and shoulders and chest, and Sylvain leans forward to catch with his lips the steam pooling onto the bow of his mouth. _Look at you_ , Sylvain tells him against his tongue, _look how well you’re taking my cock, open so wide for me_ , and Felix’s face falls into the crook of his neck with whines and hushed-up cries.

Sylvain lets his fingers trail down to where they’re joined, feels his length pulling in and out of Felix’s hole. “See?” he asks as he nips at Felix’s earlobe, and Felix’s nails scrape against his chest as he slides the tip of a finger alongside his cock. “Look how well I’m filling you up. Perfect fit.”

Sylvain hopes Felix likes it as much as he does, hearing the philistine syllables echoing against the walls and coming right back at them, amplified and deepened, listening to the shameless sound of skin on skin beating along the tiles in the silence of the room, and Sylvain’s mind gets lost into speaking every single thought that comes to him, _it’s like you were made for this, angel, made just for me_ , and Felix answers in kind, _yes, yes, yes, I’m yours, I’m yours, I’m yours_ ; Sylvain feels when he manages to reach Felix’s prostate, because Felix swears and clenches against his length and pulls him deep, deep, deep, Sylvain’s hands chiseling into the soft muscle of his ass to help him sink onto Sylvain better. One of Felix’s hands tears away from Sylvain’s chest and wraps around his own cock, fisting it in time with Sylvain’s thrusts, and Felix shushes the words Sylvain means to say with his own, _please, Sylvain, please, inside, fill me up, pump me full of your cum_ , and Sylvain barely has the time to register how turned-on he is, to hear harsh-spoken Felix say such sweet, filthy words, to be the only one who knows about this, to be the one who gets to claim Felix this way, before he feels Felix coming over both their stomachs and milk Sylvain inside of him for every single drop he’s worth.

Sylvain cannot find himself to care when they get banned from the spa indefinitely, not when Felix sleeps safe and sound and soft against him every night for the rest of the trip.

_we’ll stay inside till somebody finds up, stay inside our rosy-minded fuzz for days_

He wakes up to the feeling of an arm snaking around his shape and the weight of a naked chest pressed against his back.

Felix feels it faintly, at first; it’s so warm, here, under the covers, his consciousness surfacing from the hideaway of a half-forgotten dream, and he shifts close to the warmer spot, to the pleasant presence pressing against him, before lucidity permeates his perception. The body behind him — _Sylvain’s_ body, his mind registers, finally — pushes closer to his as calloused fingertips graze against the ridges of his stomach, ricochet along the path where his ribs meet as though skipping ripples onto still water, trace down idle touches across the fine line of hair trailing downward. The tip of Sylvain’s nose is cold as he nuzzles in the crook of Felix’s neck and peppers kisses along every stretch of naked skin he can find, his lips still serrate from the roughness of the cool autumn wind and too many open-mouthed, breathless embraces, and Felix curls into the touch like smoke.

Felix has discovered, along the year they’ve been together, that Sylvain is, irritatingly enough, a morning person; an annoyingly affectionate one, at that, always hugging and kissing Felix everywhere, as though getting revenge on the mere centimeters Felix puts between them during nighttime. Felix dislikes being touched, at night; it makes it hard for him to fall asleep, twists his limbs in uneasy postures when Sylvain wants to hold him and turn his chest into a makeshift pillow, turns him faint of breath and half-gasping for fresh air when Sylvain, damn his infuriating twelve-centimeter superiority on Felix, throws the covers over his head to cover their bodies. Sylvain had whined, the first times they’d truly slept together — not like when they were seven and nine, not even like that time after Glenn’s death — about Felix rejecting him and his touch, and Felix had swatted him over the head without really meaning it before kissing him goodnight.

So Sylvain, today as all days, compensates the dusk distance between them as soon as he dawns into consciousness, and Felix, as much of a sleepyhead he is in the mornings, lets him — lets himself be kissed and held, surrenders into Sylvain’s touch with the softness of seabreeze and the docility of cotton, and when his fingers find and fold through flaming red, a heated shiver travels up his spine as Sylvain’s smile brushes against the soft skin beneath his ear.

Sylvain pulls back, just an inch, and Felix follows, turns around to face him and lazily throw his arms around his shoulders, slides a bare calf in-between Sylvain’s. His boyfriend is naked as he came, contrary to Felix, who had the minor decency of pulling back some boxers on before going to sleep, and Felix crawls impossibly close to the warmth exuding from Sylvain’s whole frame as he feels a hand skim into his hair.

There’s a single, innocent kiss left on the top of his head. “Morning, heart of mine.”

“Morning,” Felix mumbles back through the daze of sleepiness, the nickname seeping sparks into his soul like filtered morning coffee.

“Slept well?”

“Yeah. You?”

Sylvain hums as he acquiesces into Felix’s neck, the vibrations of his voice roughening heavenly tremors across Felix’s skin, his fingertips running patterns into the wild tangle of his hair. Felix’s hands graze along the slim expanse of skin encompassing Sylvain’s ribs, pushes his nails in soft abrasions into the cracks as his eyes flutter open. October light maculates through the louvered shutters and marbles Sylvain’s skin, turns his freckled skin a vibrant coral in the places it caresses, illumines the sanctum of their new bedroom in flares and halos prisming along the walls. Sylvain’s hair blazes from auburn to vermillion, long, full eyelashes enkindling copper shadows over his cheeks, burnt sienna irises focusing on Felix when his eyes open; and for a single instant, Felix feels like he’s defied godliness itself and has pulled Sylvain José Gautier down from the sky to curse him into the finity of a human life by his side, in this flat that’s now both theirs, too small to hold all the love Felix has felt for him all these years.

He reaches forward, and kisses Sylvain, mellow and low-tempo, once, twice, thrice, until Sylvain reciprocates by brushing his lips under Felix’s eyes, along the cut of his jaw, on the side of his nose. The exhale he chuckles tickles Felix’s face, and Felix raises an eyebrow in question.

“Nothing,” Sylvain says in-between constant little pecks, “it’s just— no one would ever believe me if I told them how soft you are in the morning.”

“Don’t push your luck, Gautier,” Felix answers, but kisses the corner of Sylvain’s mouth anyway.

“What, so it’s not _my love_ anymore? I’m hurt, Fe.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Felix rolls his eyes as Sylvain’s mouth nips along his throat. “You sure look very hurt right now.”

Sylvain suddenly pushes off Felix and throws his legs off the bed, stretching lazily as he stands up, and Felix shivers both from the sudden cold and the godsent sight. “Coffee?”

Felix huffs as he buries himself deeper into the sheets. “Five minutes.”

Sylvain stalks off with a laugh, not even looking at Felix as he opens the bedroom door and steps away.

Felix lies back on the mattress, traces the shape of sunlight with his gaze along the barely-built furniture of their bedroom. They furnished the bedroom first, yesterday; the most important room, Sylvain had said, and Felix would have agreed if the comment hadn’t been laced with another one of Sylvain’s infamous innuendos, so he’d only punched him in the shoulder and thrown him an Ikea manual instead. They’d visited a dozen flats before finding this one; it’s in an old building, the type where the floorboards creak under their feet and the ceilings are adorned with crown moldings twisting into arabesque flowers, celestial-high over thin windows. There’s an ornate fireplace in the living room that they aren’t allowed to use, white and black and marbled, blanketed with old soot that Sylvain swore to clean up so that they’ll be able to spend cold winter nights side by side in front of a comforting fire, no matter how many environmental city laws they break — Sylvain always has been a bit of a hidden, hopeless romantic; Felix is glad he’s the only person who gets to see it now, to be on the receiving end of too many small surprise gifts and spontaneous date nights and unspoken declarations. The bathroom is tiny, and Felix will take a sick and sweet sort of pleasure in proving Sylvain wrong when Sylvain will inevitably make them try and take a bath together only for not fitting in himself, let alone the two of them, but that’s something to be kept for later in the day, for when they’ll finally finish building the wooden coffee table and unrolling the carpets and plugging in the washing machine.

For now, the smell of coffee drifts in from the half-opened door — the coffee pot one of the only appliances they’ve bothered putting up, and frankly the most important — and Felix rises from the soft mattress and makes his way to the half-opened kitchen off the living room, his feet growing cold in the shift from smooth floorboards to rough tiling.

Sylvain has his back turned to him when he steps into the arched, doorless doorway, the tattoo Felix is now all-too familiar with curling along the ridges of his backbone and spine; it shifts along his movements, the crimson petals fluttering in the unbreeze as Sylvain toasts some stale pieces of bread and pours coffee in their cups. Felix remembers days and nights spent learning the exact way the stem dipped under his fingers along the curve of his back, the perfect size and shading of the dragon scales, tapered black-and-grey against his tongue, the sways of carmine and vermillon and auburn like they were the very inspiration for Sylvain’s hair as Felix crinkled them in his hands and Sylvain’s eyelashes as they shivered closed. Felix is surprised himself, that knowing Sylvain by heart like a favorite song does not in any way make it less thrilling; he’s spent years thinking happiness would never come to him, picturing true love measured only in units of suffering like pointing to a crying face on a doctor’s chart, and for possibly the only time in that life he stubborned his way through, Felix is glad to have been proven wrong.

“You _have_ realized we haven’t hung the curtains yet, right.” His gaze flumes down Sylvain’s frame in rivulets of reserved rapture — there was a time where Felix had been somewhat shy, of being caught admiring Sylvain’s nakedness, as though he was still fifteen and desperately tried to convince himself away from the yearning he felt; now, a year later, the shame is all but gone, replaced by the thrilling feeling of pleasant burning and comforting safety and unconditional love.

Sylvain turns to him, the sun and stars themselves a poor match for the radiance of his smile. “Why, are you ashamed of me?”

“I could never be ashamed of you,” and it seems to take Sylvain by surprise, because his dark eyes widen to garnet; Felix steps up to him, for good measure, stealing the cup from his hand before taking a sip, and if the subtle dramatic gesture burns Felix’s tongue in retaliation, he tries his best not to show it.

Up close, he can see a bit of white paint flaking away from Sylvain’s hair; they painted the small, second bedroom that will serve as his office, yesterday, and fell asleep right after pizza and half a movie and the tenderest of sighs. Felix brushes the flakes away and Sylvain’s eyes soften to chocolate, a substance Felix despises in any other situation but this one, where Sylvain looks at him as though he’s nothing more, nothing less than his entire, tiny world. “Tell that to the neighbors when we’ll christen every single room in our home.”

Felix will most probably never get used to it, this ability of Sylvain to say the most filthy things with the sweetest of faces, but he’s learnt not to be so flustered with years of experience, and for now he only clicks his tongue and rolls his eyes as he props himself against the kitchen counter. “Keep talking like that and there’ll be no home to christen at all.”

“Why, are you going to leave?” Sylvain’s voice is teasing, but Felix knows better, knows there’s a hint of uncertainty layered deep under the tone, as though he thinks Felix could and should do exactly that before Sylvain José Gautier becomes the death of him, and the realization comes slow to Felix, like a deep understanding of Nature’s biggest law, like the dawn of a perennial moon — that there would be no kinder death than one by Sylvain’s side.

_Never_ , he wants to say, and the word is ten times more terrifying when it threatens to slip off his tongue than when it used to swirl shapeless inside his mind, more final and infinite than any other promise of forever; “No,” he says instead, false distance and nonchalance coating the syllable. “I may or may not commit arson, though.”

“I mean, the heating doesn’t work yet, so you’d be doing us a favor here.” Sylvain kisses his forehead over his bangs, and Felix presses into Sylvain's chest when he snakes freckled arms around the plush of the covers and his own wiry frame. “Our _home_.” His voice vibrates ripple-soft and emotion-strained against Felix’s temple. “It’s always been a strange concept to me, you know.”

“Idiot,” Felix answers, pressing a kiss onto the beauty spots drawing a dark constellation in the crook of Sylvain’s collarbone. “ _You’re_ the one that makes it home.”

_you know i dreamed about you, i missed you for, for twenty-nine years_

The fragrant smell of saffron and cayenne pepper weaves poetry through the kitchen along the tiny simmer of bubbles popping away.

Sylvain is cooking curry, tonight; both Felix’s and Capucine’s favorite, the one he hides plenty of vegetables in so that his daughter — _their_ daughter, perhaps, perhaps soon, Felix turns twenty-seven tomorrow, and Sylvain will ask him, and he’ll slip rose gold along his finger, and perhaps then Felix will agree — will grow tall and healthy without realizing. She’s almost five years old, now, her red hair falling in long locks Felix loves to braid and plait fresh flowers in, although he won’t ever say he’s grown soft on the girl; Sylvain remembers it like yesterday, the day Miklan had shown up at his door with a tiny baby girl in his arms, leaving her in Sylvain’s care as he left God knows where. _I won’t know how to be good to her_ , his brother had said after years of radio silence, after almost a decade of Sylvain thinking him lost to the world, _but you will_ , and he had left Capucine into Sylvain’s arms before walking away and out of their lives again, a whirlwind of fire and pain and lost chances. Sylvain almost wishes he’d have tried, almost wished he could have told him he was wrong, that he could be better, that he could be good; but it was hard, believing it himself, and there was no way he’d leave the girl in the care of his asshole father now that he’d cut ties with him, so Felix had come home that night to Sylvain singing the crying girl to sleep between two explanations — because there was no way he would let Felix believe he’d ever been anything but faithful, anything but deeply, utterly in love with his best friend for more than a decade.

He puts a lid on the cooking pot just as he hears the tumble of a key in the front door lock, and tiny footsteps rush to him before a weight settles along his shins.

“Papa,” Capucine says, eyes topaz bright and hair a blazing auburn, and Sylvain thinks she almost has Felix’s eyes when he picks her up to give her a kiss on the cheek. She frowns, half-pushes him away because he’s not clean-shaven, a red shadow across his jaw tickling her cheeks, and he laughs as he puts her down and she runs into the living room. Felix stands in the doorway, that same doorless doorway; he’s removed his coat and his shoes, long hair falling across his shoulder in a low ponytail, fitting so perfectly into Sylvain’s life that he cannot help but pull him in against his chest, as magnetic as it had been the first time, peppering kisses across his face before his lips find Felix’s and press slow and deep and true.

“I love you,” Sylvain tells him in place of a greeting as he pulls away, and Felix smiles.

“Is that why you kept the beard today? So I’d say it back?”

“I know you love it.”

“I… have something for you,” Felix says, and there’s a hint of something unsure in his voice, as though he thinks Sylvain won’t agree, as though he thinks Sylvain would ever be able to fall out of love with him. He reaches into the bag hung on his shoulder, and gets out a simple bunch of printed paper, to Sylvain’s overall confusion; Sylvain leafs through them with an idle finger, until he processes the words written in thin, sans-serif font.

“Adoption papers…?”

“For me to become Capucine’s second legal guardian,” Felix finishes as he looks anywhere but Sylvain’s eyes, the way he’s wont to do when there’s something he’s not saying, and Sylvain frowns.

“But you can’t become her second guardian if we’re not—”

“Married,” Felix finishes for him in a rush, and he thumbs out something from the pocket of his jeans.

Sylvain does not dare breathe when Felix takes his hand and pushes the thin, gold band around his ring finger, the metal glinting off the kitchen light in scales of citrine and ruby and the exact shade of Felix’s eyes when he looks back at him.

“You don’t have to do this just for Capucine, you know,” he says still, because a lifetime at Felix’s side won’t ever convince Sylvain he has done anything right in his whole life to deserve this man, even though Felix keeps proving him the exact opposite each day he survives.

Felix simply rolls his eyes, the same way he did when he was a teenager, and Sylvain’s heart grows fonder. “Sylvain José Gautier, I’m in _love_ with you. I’ve been in love with you since I was thirteen years old, and I’ll be in love with you for the rest of my days. This is as much for her as it is for me.”

Sylvain does not let him say anything else as he pulls him into a kiss, then a second, then a third, and the curry pot ends up forgotten.

He goes to sleep that night with Capucine’s small form curled between Felix and him in their bed, thinking about a dozen ways he can make Felix forgive him for burning dinner. It’s alright, Sylvain wonders; he has an entire lifetime at his side to think about it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! Please leave a comment if you liked the fic, it fuels my days and nights in these cold winter days <3
> 
> For an idea of the general timeline of this fic:  
> 1 -> felix 13, sylvain 15 going on 16  
> 2 -> felix 15 in 2nd year of HS, sylvain 17 going on 18 in his 3rd year of HS (french system)  
> 3 -> felix 19 in 2nd year of college, sylvain just turned 22 and is at the end of his 3rd and last year (french system)  
> 4 -> felix 21 going on 22, just finished his 1st year of masters' degree, sylvain 24 going on 25 just finished his masters' degree abroad and came back to france  
> 5 -> felix 23 more or less, sylvain 26 more or less, 1 year after part 4  
> 5.5 -> felix 23/24, sylvain 26, adopts capucine  
> 6 -> felix 27 the day after, sylvain 29 going on 30
> 
> You can find me on twitter @akhikosanada :)


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